Building A Paris Hall Around Its Audience

By ALAN RIDING

Published: April 14, 2007

CORRECTION APPENDED

Over the last two decades, as successive French governments have poured money into renovating the Louvre and building new museums, an opera house and a national library in Paris, lovers of orchestral music here grew resentful.

Even with the vocal backing of the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, their insistent calls for construction of a state-of-the-art concert hall went unheeded.

Now, just weeks before President Jacques Chirac leaves office, their impatience has been rewarded with the unveiling of an eye-catching design for a $260 million concert hall by the French architect Jean Nouvel. The Philharmonie de Paris, as it will be called, is scheduled to open in the Parc de la Villette, in northeast Paris, in 2012.

The aluminum-clad building -- which in a model, drawings and computer-generated images resembles a mound of loosely stacked plates topped by a 170-foot-high sail -- will have a 2,400-seat auditorium designed in what experts call a ''vineyard'' style, with the audience on all sides of the orchestra on multilevel ''terraces.''

Once completed, if its acoustics earn praise, the Philharmonie could rank among Europe's best concert halls, alongside the Berlin Philharmonic's hall, the Musikverein in Vienna and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The Orchestre de Paris will have its base there, and the hall will receive other leading orchestras as well.

Politics rather than culture, however, were behind the decision to place the new hall in La Villette, an outlying zone. In the early 1980s, reacting against the concentration of cultural institutions in central Paris, France's government, then led by the Socialists, decided to turn this area, once crowded with slaughterhouses, into a new cultural district within easy reach of low-income suburbs to the east.

As a result, La Villette today offers a science museum, the national conservatory, a rock concert hall, a large exhibition space and the Cit?e la Musique, or Music City, with its own 1,200-seat concert hall and music museum. In fact, when the Cit?e la Musique opened in 1995, an adjacent space was already reserved for a larger concert hall.

But one problem remained. Even now, the French national and Paris city governments, which are jointly financing the Philharmonie, are aware that many middle-class music lovers are reluctant to trek to the outskirts of Paris. And resistance may have grown since the Salle Pleyel, an 80-year-old concert hall in the heart of the city, was recently renovated.

To give an extra buzz to La Villette, then, it was considered vital for the Philharmonie to stand out as an architectural monument, one not only visible from the city's busy ring road, but also as commanding in appearance as, say, I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre or the Grande Arche de la D?nse, to the west of Paris.

Government officials said that Christian de Portzamparc, the French architect and 1994 Pritzker Prize-winner who designed the much-acclaimed Cit?e la Musique, had long assumed that he would be commissioned to build the new hall. But, they said, European Union rules required a fresh competition.

Early this year, from among 98 architectural firms submitting bids, 6 were invited to present detailed proposals. Last week a 24-member jury that included France's culture minister and the mayor of Paris picked Mr. Nouvel's design over those of Mr. Portzamparc, Francis Soler, Zaha Hadid, the Vienna-based firm Coop Himmelb(l)au and the Dutch firm MVRDV.

Mr. Nouvel, 61, already has two major Paris buildings to his name: the Institut du Monde Arabe, completed in 1987, and the Mus?du Quai Branly, which opened last June. He has also been chosen to build the new Louvre Abu Dhabi, part of a $1.3 billion agreement between France and that city, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Although Mr. Nouvel is the best-known French architect working today, he has so far built relatively little in the United States. His first realized project there, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, opened only last year, while he is now building two residential buildings in Manhattan: one almost completed in SoHo, the other under way in Chelsea.

More relevant to the Philharmonie de Paris is his experience in designing concert halls -- one opened in Lucerne, Switzerland, in 2000, and another is under construction in Copenhagen -- as well as updating the Op? de Lyon, which he gutted and rebuilt so that the auditorium now literally hangs from the frame of the building.

Those three projects plunged Mr. Nouvel into the mysterious world of acoustics, one no less central to the Philharmonie, where he will be working with the Australian firm of Marshall Day Acoustics, associated with Yasuhisa Toyota of Nagata Acoustics of Japan.

While the design of the building's exterior was limited only by a maximum height and the size of the plot, acoustics played a role in defining strict requirements for its auditorium, notably that no member of the audience should be more than 100 feet from the conductor.

This meant that, with a 2,400-seat capacity, the hall could be built only in a ''vineyard'' style, comparable to the Berlin Philharmonic's hall, rather than with a rectangular ''shoe box'' design, like the Musikverein and the Concertgebouw. The vineyard model also allows the public to occupy seats behind the orchestra when those are not needed for a choir.

Mr. Nouvel said that the novelty of his auditorium was to ''suspend'' balconies -- they will be attached to the building by access passages -- in a way that allows sound waves to circulate around and behind them. ''The idea is that the audience will be in the middle of the music,'' he said at the design's unveiling at the Cit?e la Musique on Thursday.

Hovering over the auditorium will be a series of acoustical canopies resembling flat clouds that can be lowered and raised to suit the orchestra and program. Experts said adjustments would be needed, for example, for concerts of jazz and world music, which are also planned for the Philharmonie.

Still, many Parisians may eventually become more familiar with the hall's striking profile, which resembles Mr. Nouvel's other designs in only one detail. As with the Mus?du Quai Branly, he has raised the building to allow gardens to extend under the hall. He evidently likes botany: the horizontal layers of his new structure, he said, will resemble ''leaves about to fly away.''

Photos: A computer rendering of the interior of the Philharmonie de Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel. (Photo by Artefactory)(pg. B7); A model of the Philharmonie de Paris, projected to open in 2012.; A computer rendering of the interior; construction of the hall, to become home to the Orchestre de Paris, is expected to cost $260 million. (Photographs from Artefactory)(pg. B11)

Correction: April 21, 2007, Saturday
An article in The Arts last Saturday about the architect Jean Nouvel's design for the new Philharmonie de Paris concert hall misstated the year in which his concert hall in Lucerne, Switzerland, opened. It was 1998, not 2000.